Ten-year-old Taobao,China’s largest online shopping site, shaping Chinese lifestyles: The platform has also benefited more than 30,000 disabled, who would otherwise have more difficulty in finding a job

May 10, 2013 Leave a comment

Ten-year-old Taobao shaping Chinese lifestyles

Updated: 2013-05-09 23:46

( Xinhua)HANGZHOU – While waiting for the subway, Beijing citizen Lin Jun fishes out his mobile phoneand places an order for 50 face masks via Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) portalsimilar to eBay, with only a few clicks.

The masks, which he uses almost every day now in the sandy spring, are expected to bebrought to his home by a delivery man the following day.

Lin bought masks around the same time 10 years ago, when the city was shrouded in panicover the SARS epidemic. But buying such commodities was never as easy as it is now.

On Friday, taobao.com, the country’s largest online shopping site,  will celebrate its 10thanniversary since its establishment in the eastern city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Over the decade, e-commerce spearheaded by Taobao as well as other sites likedangdang.com and 360buy.com has gained a strong foothold in the Chinese market, usheringin a new mode of shopping, particularly among tech-savvy youngsters.

“I can not separate myself from Taobao now. It is becoming a lifestyle, or it is life itself,” said MeiXiao, a civil servant in Wuhan, Hubei province.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Commerce, it is estimated that China’s onlinecommerce industry raked in more than 1.1 trillion yuan (about 175 billion U.S. dollars) inrevenue in 2012, up from 25.8 billion yuan in 2006.

Taobao alone features nearly one billion products and has nearly 500 million registered users.It sells 48,000 products each minute and its maximum daily turnover reached 4.38 billion yuan,according to taobao.com.

Taobao’s parent company, Alibaba Group, also owns Tmall, a popular business-to-consumer(B2C) portal like Amazon.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma announced early this year that he would step down from the CEOpost, and his successor is scheduled to be named on Friday. But he will continue to serve aschairman, responsible for making strategic decisions for the board of directors.

More than just buying

As the country’s largest online shopping platform, Taobao brings not only a new lifestyle forshoppers but also tremendous work opportunities  for the country’s huge number of jobseekers.

It has more than 8 million online vendors who create jobs for over 10 million, most of whom areself-employed.

The platform has also benefited more than 30,000 disabled, who would otherwise have moredifficulty in finding a job.

Gu Linglei, a blind young man in Hangzhou, has to resort to software that reads screen contentto communicate with his online customers.

Nevertheless, Gu has so far clinched more than 4,000 deals, mostly digital products and phonecards.

Booming e-commerce also boosted the fast growth of China’s delivery business, with thenumber of delivery men in the country expected to reach 1 million by the year 2015.

Taobao delivers 20 million parcels every day, accounting for 70 percent of the country’s total.

Jack Ma is considering building up an even bigger logistics network that will be capable ofdelivering 200 million parcels daily with sales revenue up to 30 billion yuan.

“No matter where you are, the goods will be delivered to your home within 24 hours after youplace an order. This is what we are trying to achieve,” he said.

Taobao never stops exploring new business opportunities.

Last month, parent company Alibaba invested 586 million dollars to purchase an 18-percentshare of Weibo Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sina Corp., the country’s leading onlinemedia company. The Twitter-like Weibo is China’s most influential social media outlet.

The two companies will cooperate in various areas such as user account connectivity, dataexchange, online payment and online marketing, according to company sources.

They will also explore new business models for social commerce based on the interactions ofusers on Weibo and on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, the sources said.

 

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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